Acknowledgements

This data was gathered by Jake Daniels. It covers data collected on the SEO tag between 2018-01-01 and 2018-05-31 from Medium.com. This includes: the title, date of publication, claps generated, author, reading time, and the url.

There’s a total of 8396 articles in this dataset.

Here’s a look at what that looks like:

title date claps author reading_time url
How Airbnb is putting AMP at the core of its digital strategy 2018-01-01 969 Clark Boyd 8 https://medium.com/swlh/how-airbnb-is-putting-amp-at-the-core-of-its-digital-strategy-d6b9cf1fc0ad?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------
Overcome the Google Gods: The Best SEO Learning Tools 2018-02-08 951 The Mission 3 https://medium.com/the-mission/overcome-the-google-gods-the-best-seo-learning-tools-d1de6b170e2?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------
How I built a game in a week 2018-02-12 916 Ada Rose Cannon 10 https://medium.com/samsung-internet-dev/how-i-built-a-game-in-a-week-5810b1197686?source=tag_archive---------1---------------------
91 Experts Share the Most Effective SEO Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Website [Expert Roundup] 2018-02-14 821 Shane Barker 23 https://medium.com/swlh/91-experts-share-the-most-effective-seo-tips-to-drive-traffic-to-your-website-expert-roundup-2c378143b16f?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------
5 marketing tips and tricks for your website in 2018 2018-04-24 761 Anna Bazoyan 3 https://medium.com/@annabazoyan/5-marketing-tips-and-tricks-for-your-website-in-2018-e5e182742409?source=tag_archive---------9---------------------
Top 500-+ High PR Do follow Backlinks site list 2018-01-25 755 270+ Web 2.0 Sites List for SEO high pr backlinks 4 https://medium.com/@BestHighPRWeb2.0SitesList/top-500-high-pr-do-follow-backlinks-site-list-8c7633424717?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------
5 MANTRAS TO BUILD A PROFITABLE ONLINE STORE 2018-01-05 750 Prabhash Kumar 4 https://medium.com/webpreneurs-hub/5-mantras-to-build-a-profitable-online-store-d4684f436e50?source=tag_archive---------3---------------------
What is Webpreneurship And What It means for your startups? 2018-03-26 706 Prabhash Kumar 5 https://medium.com/webpreneurs-hub/what-is-webpreneurship-and-what-it-means-for-your-startups-a9b4caa0f5d7?source=tag_archive---------12---------------------
自然流量新來源?SEO 經營新方向?手機版 Chrome 的文章推薦! 2018-05-24 662 侯智薰(Raymond CH Hou) 6 https://medium.com/@raymondhou/chrome-seo-article-for-you-8a458dda4cba?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------
Efficiently snapshotting your single-page-apps with Puppeteer 2018-02-27 631 Chang Wang 4 https://hackernoon.com/efficiently-snapshotting-spas-with-puppeteer-c4c77aa2831b?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------
Step By Step On Site SEO Practical Guide (2018 Edition) 2018-04-02 599 Prabhash Kumar 13 https://medium.com/webpreneurs-hub/step-by-step-on-site-seo-practical-guide-2018-edition-c7d44cea9422?source=tag_archive---------2---------------------
Grow Your Business online With 8 Proven Expert Techniques (2018 Edition) 2018-04-06 599 Prabhash Kumar 9 https://medium.com/webpreneurs-hub/grow-your-business-online-with-8-proven-expert-techniques-2018-edition-ffc18e21356c?source=tag_archive---------4---------------------
Black Hat SEO Techniques That Still Work In 2018 2018-04-10 598 Prabhash Kumar 8 https://medium.com/@prabhash5/black-hat-seo-techniques-that-still-work-in-2018-a7f599dd7e88?source=tag_archive---------9---------------------
Why I post more content to Medium.com instead of my own website 2018-03-21 593 George Kao 5 https://medium.com/@georgekao/why-i-post-more-content-to-medium-com-instead-of-my-own-website-afc4de478e09?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------
Optimizing Your Site For Lead Generation 2018-05-16 577 JotForm 7 https://medium.com/@JotForm/optimizing-your-site-for-lead-generation-c53350740e3d?source=tag_archive---------3---------------------
以網頁設計觀點切入 — 用關鍵字SEO強化你的 Medium文章 2018-05-02 572 林育正 Riven 4 https://medium.com/monospace-tw/%E6%A8%99%E9%A1%8C%E6%A0%BC%E5%BC%8F%E4%B8%8D%E6%98%AF%E6%8B%BF%E4%BE%86%E8%AA%BF%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%97%E9%AB%94%E7%9A%84%E5%95%A6-%E4%BB%A5%E7%B6%B2%E9%A0%81%E8%A8%AD%E8%A8%88%E8%A7%80%E9%BB%9E%E5%88%87%E5%85%A5medium-fcc18c3f7ef7?source=tag_archive---------2---------------------
5 Digital Marketing Trends to lapse in 2018 2018-02-13 558 Skilfinity 4 https://medium.com/skilfinity/5-digital-marketing-trends-to-lapse-in-2018-d9bd9c79982b?source=tag_archive---------6---------------------
Coding a Strong Foundation for SEO 2018-02-06 547 Cronofy 7 https://hackernoon.com/coding-a-strong-foundation-for-seo-f16643bf325d?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------
QWANT, THE FRENCH SEARCH ENGINE AGAINST THE CALIFORNIA GIANT 2018-02-20 511 Laura Gravoueille 2 https://medium.com/@lauragrveille/qwant-the-french-search-engine-against-the-california-giant-cfbecc08e53a?source=tag_archive---------7---------------------
Read This Before Starting Your Content Marketing Efforts 2018-05-18 486 Tigran Hakobyan 7 https://artplusmarketing.com/read-this-before-starting-your-content-marketing-efforts-653ed323faee?source=tag_archive---------1---------------------
Hire Digital Marketing Expert | SEO Consultant | SMO & SMM Company 2018-05-27 473 Muhammad Irfan Wadood 1 https://medium.com/@muhammadirfanwadood/hire-digital-marketing-expert-seo-consultant-smo-smm-company-b6ddcdaf31c2?source=tag_archive---------6---------------------
Best High PR Back link site list 2018-01-02 466 270+ Web 2.0 Sites List for SEO high pr backlinks 2 https://medium.com/@BestHighPRWeb2.0SitesList/best-high-pr-page-rank-back-link-site-list-de2d73ed8306?source=tag_archive---------3---------------------
High authority web 2.0 backlinks sites list 2018-02-07 466 270+ Web 2.0 Sites List for SEO high pr backlinks 2 https://medium.com/@BestHighPRWeb2.0SitesList/high-authority-websites-backlinks-sites-list-c40b0488a222?source=tag_archive---------1---------------------
The Importance of Visual Marketing 2018-04-25 465 Lia Berberyan 4 https://medium.com/@berberyan2555/https-medium-com-the-importance-of-visual-marketing-give-me-an-a-please-852b5ecd5bc9?source=tag_archive---------5---------------------
This 15-year-old has built 8 apps and India’s first social search engine 2018-01-12 457 Abhik Saha 7 https://medium.com/swlh/this-15-year-old-has-built-8-apps-and-indias-first-social-search-engine-aa36100589a5?source=tag_archive---------0---------------------

Time-series

Here’s what the data collected looks over time.

Weekly/Daily Posts

Daily and weekly totals are shown– along with a trend line. We’ll look at some trending words per week after.

Day-Of-Week Frequency

We can summarize articles by weekday. Later we can examine their effectiveness.

Weekly

By using term-frequency-in-document-frequency or TF-IDF, we can find the most relevant word of each week.

If you’re curious, here’s chart of the three most relevant words per week. You can look for the highest clap averages and see what topics were important that week.

I recommend sorting by avg_claps_that_week (click the table to sort) and see what relevant words were likely responsibile for increased claps.

Frequent Terms

Here are words and phrases that are most used in headlines. The phrases have been stemmed to best gather their relations.

Correlated Words

We’ll examine networks of correlated words and show clusters that are most effective. The first graph takes popular terms and shows their child nodes.

## Selecting by correlation

We can dissect these pairings further and see phrases that are most commonly correlated.

Word Networks

Here is a network of the correlated words in the article headers.

We can look at those groupings and see clusters of topics

If we add another dimension, then we can see which of the networks are most effective for generating claps.

Need help reading the charts?

Each connected node is part of a topic. We depend on the colours to distinguish which are popular or unpopular.

Topic Clusters

The networks above show relationships between words that create topics.

We’ll look more at giving our computer the chance to create topics by looking for clusters of words. We use unsupervised machine-learning to find clusters of words that are frequently used together. These topics can typically be inferenced. It’s a good way to get a feel for big trends currently underway in the industry.

Here’s 5 clusters that hold 8 words to describe the topic:

This creates our topic clusters! Great for brainstorming content and knowing what’s commonly talked about. I’ll include a peek at what is going on under the hood.

Tweaking the numbers forms different topics.

Word Impact

Now we have some interactivity.

Here are words that are impactful/overused. And words that are proven to bring claps.

The size is based on another measurement called geometric mean. It is often used when data is highly skewed. It can be a tie-breaker for clusters that are close together.

Curious what the other words are? Interact with this graph:

And here’s a table of those terms ranked by geometric mean:

Top 25 Terms
Performance
Word Geometric Average Occurences
write 1.27 125
tool 1.24 158
content 1.11 315
expert 1.06 126
googl 1.04 526
blog 1.00 287
post 0.92 108
site 0.91 252
backlink 0.90 115
free 0.90 112
step 0.88 145
trend 0.78 107
lead 0.76 91
result 0.70 94
organ 0.69 100
search 0.68 593
rank 0.63 327
creat 0.62 90
guid 0.62 174
top 0.62 371
effect 0.60 131
page 0.60 237
tip 0.60 367
increas 0.58 137
list 0.56 115

Viral Words

Let’s subset popular articles from ones that are average and see if there’s a difference in word usage.

## Joining, by = "word"
## Joining, by = "word"
## Joining, by = "word"
## Joining, by = "word"

Let’s put them on the same graphs and look at the difference in proportion usage.

Word Choice in Viral Posts vs Avg. Post ()

Take a look at the viral phrases, * if diff is positive, it is more viral * if diff is negative, it is more average * if diff is close to 0, it is found commonly in both.
Viral Words
word diff
seo strategi 0.0028526
googl analyt 0.0027334
content market 0.0026798
search engin 0.0019226
user experi 0.0014994
seo tool 0.0013533
voic search 0.0013533
engin optim 0.0013265
guest post 0.0010880
seo checklist 0.0010880
seo expert 0.0010612
app store 0.0006766
busi onlin 0.0006766
domain author 0.0006766
engin market 0.0006766
featur snippet 0.0006766
free seo 0.0006766
imag search 0.0006766
market servic 0.0006766
onlin consult 0.0006766
page rank 0.0006766
googl search 0.0006498
meta descript 0.0005306
search result 0.0005306
seo friend 0.0005306
seo mistak 0.0005306
market compani 0.0004769
一定 要 0.0002653
black hat 0.0002653
blog site 0.0002653
busi seo 0.0002653
free tool 0.0002653
hat seo 0.0002653
increas organ 0.0002653
manag servic 0.0002653
market campaign 0.0002653
market tip 0.0002653
market trend 0.0002653
quick guid 0.0002653
seo audit 0.0002653
seo copywrit 0.0002653
seo plugin 0.0002653
seo search 0.0002653
media market 0.0001192
meta tag 0.0001192
page speed 0.0001192
qualiti backlink 0.0001192
seo hack 0.0001192
websit traffic 0.0001192
site list -0.0000537
маркетинг в -0.0001461
маркетинг для -0.0001461
ต่อ seo -0.0001461
เว็บไซต์ ของ -0.0001461
action tip -0.0001461
basic seo -0.0001461
build qualiti -0.0001461
build strategi -0.0001461
busi blog -0.0001461
busi directori -0.0001461
busi growth -0.0001461
common mistak -0.0001461
compani offer -0.0001461
design develop -0.0001461
digit strategi -0.0001461
ecommerc site -0.0001461
effect seo -0.0001461
email market -0.0001461
essenti seo -0.0001461
estat market -0.0001461
evergreen content -0.0001461
feel lucki -0.0001461
frog seo -0.0001461
generat idea -0.0001461
generat lead -0.0001461
golden rule -0.0001461
googl confirm -0.0001461
googl job -0.0001461
googl seo -0.0001461
googl trend -0.0001461
googl voic -0.0001461
increas traffic -0.0001461
it’ time -0.0001461
latent semant -0.0001461
learn tool -0.0001461
load speed -0.0001461
love seo -0.0001461
market de -0.0001461
market expert -0.0001461
market solut -0.0001461
media manag -0.0001461
nowfloat boost -0.0001461
onlin store -0.0001461
optim content -0.0001461
page optim -0.0001461
pbn backlink -0.0001461
post checklist -0.0001461
profession digit -0.0001461
python panda -0.0001461
qualiti content -0.0001461
react spa -0.0001461
reput manag -0.0001461
scream frog -0.0001461
search market -0.0001461
semant index -0.0001461
seo blog -0.0001461
seo de -0.0001461
seo market -0.0001461
seo perform -0.0001461
seo spider -0.0001461
simpl seo -0.0001461
site search -0.0001461
site speed -0.0001461
site web -0.0001461
sitio web -0.0001461
social bookmark -0.0001461
speed updat -0.0001461
step seo -0.0001461
structur data -0.0001461
sunday talk -0.0001461
top digit -0.0001461
top free -0.0001461
top search -0.0001461
tu sitio -0.0001461
você precisa -0.0001461
wordpress blog -0.0001461
yoast seo -0.0001461
googl map -0.0002921
googl rank -0.0002921
growth hack -0.0002921
market digit -0.0002921
servic provid -0.0002921
submiss site -0.0002921
de seo -0.0004382
drive traffic -0.0004382
market agenc -0.0004382
search consol -0.0004382
top seo -0.0004382
крауд маркетинг -0.0005842
lead generat -0.0005842
blog post -0.0006111
seo tip -0.0006111
boost seo -0.0007035
brand awar -0.0007035
content strategi -0.0007035
content writer -0.0007035
de conteúdo -0.0007035
design servic -0.0007035
easi step -0.0007035
googl updat -0.0007035
improv seo -0.0007035
inbound market -0.0007035
increas websit -0.0007035
rank factor -0.0007035
search rank -0.0007035
seo en -0.0007035
seo smm -0.0007035
seo task -0.0007035
top posit -0.0007035
web traffic -0.0007035
wordpress plugin -0.0007035
market tool -0.0008495
organ traffic -0.0008495
seo agenc -0.0008495
websit design -0.0008495
websit rank -0.0008495
market strategi -0.0009032
seo consult -0.0009956
beginn guid -0.0012609
busi websit -0.0012609
commerc websit -0.0012609
content optim -0.0012609
content write -0.0012609
graphic design -0.0012609
local busi -0.0012609
onlin reput -0.0012609
real estat -0.0012609
web tasarım -0.0012609
busi owner -0.0014069
design compani -0.0014069
link build -0.0015530
onlin market -0.0015530
seo trend -0.0016991
local seo -0.0018451
seo rank -0.0019644
onlin busi -0.0021104
seo compani -0.0029331
web develop -0.0029331
seo techniqu -0.0040480
internet market -0.0041940
page seo -0.0054549
seo servic -0.0056010
social media -0.0059199
web design -0.0071540
digit market -0.0086563

Let’s Combine them!